Veritas Jointer Blade Sharpener — and What Amazon Has Instead
A jig that hones jointer and planer knives in place. Nothing on Amazon matches it, so here is the honest workaround.
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Jointer and planer knives go dull long before they go damaged. A dull knife leaves a surface that looks planed and feels slightly fuzzy, and it burnishes rather than cuts in figured timber.
The obvious fix is to sharpen them, and the reason people do not is the resetting. Take three knives out of a cutterhead, sharpen them, and you then have to set all three to exactly the same height relative to the outfeed table, or the machine snipes and leaves ridges.
Veritas’s jointer blade sharpener is designed around that problem: it hones the knives while they remain in the cutterhead, so nothing needs resetting. Lee Valley sells it direct, and there is no Amazon equivalent. If in-situ honing is what you want, order it from them.
The workaround, honestly
The kit scored here is a drill press sharpening system: arbors, acrylic discs, adhesive abrasive discs and leather for stropping. Mounted in a drill press, it gives a flat rotating abrasive surface that will hone a straight knife accurately, along with chisels and plane irons.
It is a good system. It does not solve the resetting problem, because the knives have to come out.
If you are removing knives anyway
Two things make resetting much less painful.
A magnetic knife-setting jig — a pair of magnets that sit on the outfeed table and hold each knife at the right height while you tighten the gib — turns a fiddly hour into ten minutes. They are cheap and widely available.
And take note of the numbers before you start. Set a dial indicator on the outfeed table, record the height of each knife at top dead centre, and put them back to the same reading.
The other option nobody mentions
Disposable-insert cutterheads. If your machine takes one, a spiral or helical head with four-sided carbide inserts removes this entire problem: a dull edge means rotating an insert with a torx driver, not sharpening anything.
They are expensive, and they are the reason the sharpening question mostly disappeared from newer workshops. Worth pricing before investing in jigs for an old straight-knife head.
What works
- A drill press sharpening setup gives a genuinely flat, repeatable hone on a straight knife, which is what a jointer knife needs
- The abrasive discs and leather give you a full progression from honing to stropping in one kit
- It doubles for chisels and plane irons, so it is not a single-purpose purchase
What doesn't
- It is not a jointer knife jig: it will not hone a knife in situ in the cutterhead, which is the specific thing the Veritas tool does
- Knives have to come out of the machine, which means resetting them afterwards — the job most people are trying to avoid
- It needs a drill press, and a drill press with a table that is square to the spindle
Worth comparing against
- Check price
DMT
DMT W250FCNB DuoSharp Bench Stone, Fine/Coarse, 10 in
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Generic
Side-Clamping Honing Guide for Chisels and Plane Irons